Jack Steele 3484 words
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How Things Are: A Summary
By
Jack Steele
It is not my intention to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe over again. My story differs from his in many respects, not least of which is that from the first moment of my isolation I had absolutely no idea what had happened to me. Nor was it my luck to find even the most insignificant artifact of civilization, let alone a whole trunk full of provisions. I was on my own from the moment I opened my eyes. I was naked, hungry. The first thing I saw was the sun coming up over the ocean. I lay on the beach curled up prenatally for a long time. I watched the sun clear the horizon. I watched and heard the surf. I felt the air, the sand. I waited, assuming that I would soon know where and who I was. I closed my eyes and dreamed that I knew the answers, but when I willed myself to wake up and open my eyes again, I found that I’d forgotten.
Finally, when sleep refused to come again, I sat up and looked around. The air was balmy. The sand was white. The ocean was clear. The sky was blue. Behind me were palm trees. Behind the trees was a sheer cliff of black rock. I began to try to remember. I recited the alphabet to myself, thought of first names, last names, and then said first and last names aloud. I said names of towns and cities aloud. Countries. Continents. Oceans. Mountain ranges. Rivers. Suburbs. Streets. Highways. And then I began to curse. I raised my voice and shouted obscenities. I hit myself on the back and side of the head. I jumped around. I spread my legs, put my hands on my hips and moved my head around frantically. I did somersaults. I tried to stand on my head and do cartwheels. Nothing worked as even a clue to where or who I might be.
I sat back down. Then I lay down and curled up again as before. After a while it occurred to me that civilization might be just around the corner, or in this case, the curve of the beach, and that was possibly all I needed to regain my memory. The sight of a person. A car. A house. Even a horse or a cow. I stood up again and looked more carefully at the palm trees. I looked for smoke. I walked a few feet into the trees and stared. I couldn’t see far. The trees were too close together, and the undergrowth was not inviting. I returned to the water’s edge and started walking along the shoreline. I felt better. It would be awkward, of course, no matter what, but even if I were thrown in jail for being naked and my memory didn’t return immediately, it would be a start.
I didn’t think about cannibals. I’m a contemporary person. That much I could infer from what I did know, that it was the twentieth century. My thoughts ran to a fishing village in Mexico or friendly aborigines. Probably, though, it would be luxury homes or high rise hotels. Maybe the first person I’d see would be a surfer, and maybe he’d take pity on me and loan me a pair of pants. But then what? The surfer would loan me a pair of pants, but where would I go? And how would I get there? A pair of pants and a ride into town. A pair of pants, a ride into town, a phone call. Except I wouldn’t know who to call. The police or a hospital? The Salvation Army? “I woke up on the beach and I don’t know who I am or how I got there.” That would do fine: clear and to the point. After that some authority would take over. I’d get fed. A place to sleep. A shirt and shoes. After I rested, someone official would visit me and ask questions, take my fingerprints and whatever else was needed. And then someone who knew me would show up to take me home. You’ve had a blow to the head, dear, or a rare illness. I’m your wife, your mother, your father, your brother or your sister, your son or your daughter. Doesn’t matter. He or she would lead me to a pleasant room of my own, plenty of books to read, good food, the right medicine, and slowly but surely my memory would return, or else, at the very least, I’d grow to like, even love, the person who says she is my wife, my mother, my father, brother, sister, son, daughter. I might even start working again at whatever it was I did, or maybe I’d want to do something different. There’s a story in that, more than one perhaps, but one in particular that interests me: after a while, I’d start to wonder if I didn’t lose my memory because I was desperate for change. In that case, though, would it be just my job I’d want to change? Maybe I felt trapped by a woman, perhaps the very woman who came to fetch me and put me up, or a whole family, or more grim, a terminal illness, a hopeless addiction, and regaining my memory would put me right back in the same boat.
In case you’re wondering, before I left the spot where I woke up, I looked around for my clothes. And yes, the next thing I did, eventually, was look for water. And food. I found no clothes, and perhaps even more frightening, in retrospect, no plastic, no metal, no bottles or cans. I found water in a neaby stream. I found oysters and scallops and smashed them against rocks to eat them. But no surfer. No cannibals, no high rise hotels, and no personal memory, not even now, twenty years later. I don’t even know my name. I looked at my hands back then and estimated forty years old. I knew I spoke English. I knew I had an American accent. I eventually thought I might be from Texas, or at least had lived there for a long time, considering expressions that came to me naturally, the places I remembered most vividly, the food I thought about most. I knew about books, mostly fiction. I knew a little Spanish. I thought a lot about enchiladas, pecan pie, and beautiful mature women with dark hair and voluptuous bodies. I soon found out I was pretty good at cooking and hunting, but not so good at making tools for those activities. I had few survival skills. I had to invent my own knots. It took me a long time to make a fire and build a shelter that did me any good. But I’m fine now. I sleep well and eat well, and I haven’t been sick since the day I got here. Not even a toothache.
If it survives along with this, you will find a description of the island in Book 1. You will find a history of my time here in Book 2. I’m not sure why I bothered. There were days when writing those volumes was more of a chore than a pleasure. I’m impatient. I’m lazy. Or can often be. You’re the most free man in the world, I would think, and here you are making work for yourself. And yet I’m proud of my books. It’s unlikely that anyone will see them, that there will ever be a real you, someone I’m not imagining, but I always knew that. I’ve been resigned to my fate for a long while now. Like a recovering addict, I often go for days now without thinking about escape. A man alone in paradise. Would that be a good title? Alone in Paradise. It’s crossed my mind of course that I could be in either heaven or hell. Or even purgatory. I know it’s a common thought, an old saw, but did I, me in particular, read, or do I simply remember someone saying, that playing harps all day on streets of gold does not sound like heaven? Sometimes that sort of thing happens: something I know about might have come from a personal memory, but I can never pin it down. I can’t say my father used to say that.
I’m considering a Book 3. It would catalogue everything I can remember from life before. Not my life. Life in general, which is the only life I remember. The beauty of the idea is that it could end only in my death. I’d just keep remembering things, it would be a lifetime job, but that’s also a problem and probably why I’ve put it off, why I diverted my attention first to the physical details of the island and then to chronicling my days here. Even when I think of it as compiling a catalogue of memory, a rational task, a list with categories and sub-categories, or alternately as something more complex, an historical map, a maze of curving and overlapping corridors and rooms, even then it would be easy for me to fall off the wagon and begin to obsess about discovering my own personal past. And that’s the last thing I want to happen. Even if I can’t stop caring completely about recovering my personal past, I’m convinced that it will never happen if I approach it directly. If it happens, it will just pop into my head one day, out of nowhere, and if I believed in God, I’d pray to Him that it would stay put in my consciousness, my personal past, never to be forgotten again, but I know it would scare me to death once I’d recovered my memory to fall asleep.
Also, it’s another project, and I’m of two minds about staying busy. I estimate my age to be about sixty, and if I’m destined to live a long life, say twenty more years, I’m not sure I could stay interested for that long in another project. I could always abandon it from time to time, or think of it as temporarily abandoned, true or not, and even start that way. Think of it as a project I do when I feel like it. On the other hand, I know myself pretty well by now, as you might imagine, and I know I’d feel guilty if I neglected my work. Guilty and afraid. The guilty part suggests conventional middle class origins, doesn’t it? Work work work. Stay out of the devil’s workshop. And the fear? It’s the fear of forgetting, which is probably also middle class, or middle brow, not wanting anything to disappear, ever. I keep my writing tools next to where I sleep, just in case I wake up knowing something I might forget. I’m convinced, despite everything, and have been since that first day, since that first dream I had while I was still curled up naked on the sand, that I know who I am when I’m sleeping.
I don’t know what this is exactly, this piece of writing. I just got up this morning and started it. A summation, I guess, a kind of preface to the books, which might mean I don’t have too long to live. The urge to summarize suggests a kind of fear of the end, don’t you think? But perhaps you’d rather read about the flora and fauna, even though I’m not a trained biologist, or even a naturalist. I made up names for things. I’m not even sure what a stamen is. Book 1 has a glossary, which might be of interest to philosophers. My categories may be unique. The names for things certainly are. Or maybe you’re more interested in my physical struggle for survival. My determination, ingenuity and cunning. My heroic determination to not just survive but make a decent life for myself, in the face of overwhelming odds. Maybe you’ll find it inspirational. Book 2 might even become a sensational best seller. Book 1 would have more of a cult following. My character revealed through my observations. Required reading for freshman classes, and guaranteed to bore them even more than Walden Pond. If my works survive and sound good to you, go ahead and put this down and move on to them right now. Don’t even finish this. I can’t blame you. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Okay, now that we’ve separated the sheep from the goats, while the lightweights are off leafing through my inspirational struggles, or looking for weird plant or animal species, what I really want to talk about is my obsession to remember, which I control during the day with hard work, both physical and mental, and at night with a drinkable enough wine from a berry that grows everywhere on the island. I drink a cup of it every evening while preparing my supper. I know the joke, another one of those old saws of uncertain origin, but it really is for medicinal purposes. It helps me stay in control, not dwell too much on topics I ought to avoid. Once an addict, especially to an idea, always an addict, and I’ve never been able to completely give up on the notion that I would be saved, literally rescued, if I could only remember who I am. No matter how hard I try to dissuade myself, no matter how much common sense tells me I’d be happier if I’d just leave it alone, I’m convinced that something is obstructing that part of my memory, and if I only knew how, or tried hard enough, I could remove the obstruction and not just know, but actually return to my former life. Maybe even where I left off.
But here’s the really pitiful part. Sometimes, especially after a few cups of wine, or just after I wake up in the morning, I almost convince myself that I just dreamed these twenty years. Not only that but I often dream that I know who I am, and I can’t say how many times I’ve believed, with all my heart, that if I could just get up from a dream, wake myself up, move my legs and stand up, I’d know myself again. But someone or something is always pressing down so hard on my knees that it hurts, and no matter how I struggle, there is no escape.
I’ve already told you the conclusions I came to from observation of myself. My forty year old hands. My American speech. My Texas taste in food. Where my thoughts tended to linger in regard to women. My knowledge of literature. I could tell you a lot more. Politically, I’m left of center. I have a scar from an operation, lower abdomen, right side, horizontal, about four inches. Clearly, then, when I arrived here I was middle-aged, middle-American, educated, liberal leaning, healthy, and I’ve learned over the years that I tend to be pretty even-tempered and prone to worry.
All along I’ve wondered the obvious. Is this far more than a dream? Is it in fact some extreme form of escape? Perhaps I was guilty of something I couldn’t bear. Had I betrayed or even murdered a wife or a friend? God knows it could even be worse than that. Perhaps I’d murdered my own family, abused a child, killed innocent people through negligence. Maybe I was guilty of what I remember as “the drop the baby syndrome,” a good man who pays for one mistake his whole life. Maybe it had made me crazy enough to imagine an island, whereas in reality I’ve been in a cell in a mental hospital for twenty years.
I do have hallucinations, but I’m quite comfortable with them. As I sip my wine and watch the pot boil, I usually talk to my imaginary wives. I have three. One is like me, like the wife I might have had in my other life, and she’s grown old with me. Another is quite young and brown skinned, mainly there for fucking, and the third is an old brown skinned woman with wild white hair, a sort of combination wise woman and servant. I trade quips with the white woman. She challenges and teases me about everything. The brown skinned girl sleeps near my bed and usually comes when called. Her job is to be just sulky enough to keep me interested. The old woman nurses and pampers me when I’m feeling low. I’ve thought about also having male imaginary friends, but decided it would be too much trouble and could easily get out of control. Once I invent these people, they pretty much have minds of their own, and it wouldn’t be safe to have males around without additional women, unless I wanted to share, which I don’t. And additional men and women might mean kids, a complication I do not want.
I jot notes down about my dreams every morning and talk to my white wife about them in the evening as we sip our wine. “Maybe it was just an ordinary tragedy,” she’s suggested more than once. “Nothing you feel guilty about. Just something terrible you can’t deal with. The death of a child. Your family in a car wreck or plane crash. A horrible disease. You or someone you love a paraplegic. You or someone you love the victim of an unspeakable crime.” “I know. I acknowledge those possibilities,” I said, “but I keep coming back to guilt. It has to be, because the dreams are always about being late, or missing an appointment, or getting lost. Not grief. Not even despair. Rather, some obligation I’ve failed at. Or avoided.” “And now you’re all alone,” she tells me. “With no one to let down. Blissfully so. No one to burden you. Except me, of course, and the girl and the old woman.” “Which is not nothing. I couldn’t just decide to stop imagining you. No more than I can stop imagining this world, if that’s what I’m doing.” “You could kill yourself,” she said. “That would be the only way to know for sure.” That’s what I liked about my white wife. She pulled no punches. “Would you miss me?” I asked. I looked around, but the other two showed no sign of hearing me. I’m not even sure they speak English. The old woman was stirring the pot. The girl was sitting on her haunches, drawing circles in the dirt with a stick. My white wife said, “That really would be a miracle, wouldn’t it? Your imaginary wives survive you. Hard to get my head around it, but I guess we’d be imaginary widows and mourn imaginarily. But tell me. Seriously. Aren’t you happy? Don’t we make you happy?”
It was a good question, and not the first time she’d asked it, and as always, I hedged, even about what I wanted. To be happy or good? As long as there was a chance that I hadn’t been a very good person in my other life, did I deserve to be happy in this one? All I knew for sure was that I believed that being good was far more important than being happy. In fact, I believed it was a requirement, but believing, unfortunately, doesn’t guarantee doing. Does it count, though, that I’d led a pretty industrious and sober, even productive life over the past twenty years? And I thought I was pretty good to my imaginary wives. Wouldn’t that count, even though they were imaginary?
We were cooking rabbit stew. They’re really more like rats, they’re everywhere, and one of my staples. An invasive species, perhaps, which may or may not suggest previous human visitors. They may have floated in on debris, although I’ve never found any signs of debris. Anyway, they’re big and juicy and easy to catch, and I often roast them, but I also like to make a stew. There’s a turnip-like weed that grows higher up, I can use both the greens and the root, and I’ve found some nuts that aren’t bad when cooked long enough. And so on. Add a few mussels, scallops, berries. I’ve even found something that approaches mustard, and over the years I’ve developed a strong attachment to anything cooked in mustard-flavored rabbit stock. I eat now sitting on my haunches. Once you master it, it’s much better than sitting on the ground with your legs crossed. I’ve made wooden bowls and spoons. Sometimes I go for a swim after I eat, but usually it’s straight to bed. If I don’t swim, I’m often asleep by the time the women finish eating, but if not, I ask the brown-skinned girl to join me. When she’s in the mood, she can be quite passionate.
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